It isn’t wrong to say that 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is the highest domestic-grossing film in history at $936 million. It is.…
It isn’t wrong to say that 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is the highest domestic-grossing film in history at $936 million. It is. It’s also not wrong to point out that, adjusted for ticket-price inflation, 1939’s “Gone With The Wind” nearly doubles it when the shade under $200 million it pulled in is put in some form of context. (The original “Star Wars” is second on that list, with “The Force Awakens” a respectable 11th.)
How you process such matters is largely a matter of personal preference and how persnickety you feel like being. At worst, it should offer a realization that raw totals usually need to be compared more than in just the primary sense. Economies change. Values change. Everything, in some sense, is relative. With that in mind, consider Thursday’s big baseball news.
Bryce Harper will, in fact, receive the largest contract by dollars in the history of the sport when his reported 13-year, $330 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies becomes official. It is a franchise definer, to be sure, especially given it reportedly has no opt-out clause. A length never seen in basketball and football, and one since phased out in the NHL. (Five active players are on contracts of at least 13 years, with Shea Weber’s 14-year, $110-year deal signed with Nashville in 2012 the product of an offer-sheet war.)
That largest-by-dollars, though? Given Giancarlo Stanton signed for $325 million five years ago, you can likely see where this Harper discussion is headed at least generally.
Specifically, it’s headed behind Manny Ramirez’s eight-year, $160 million contract with the Red Sox in 2001. As well as five others that top it when accounting for the changing, growing anti-player baseball landscape.
In mid-December, the sabermetrically inclined Fangraphs dug into this idea, formulating a list of the largest contracts in baseball history if all are calculated in 2019 dollars. Rather than simply scaling by inflation, however, writer Craig Edwards “attempted to replicate the big contracts over the last couple of decades using baseball salaries as the base for inflation.
